To Tweet or Not to Tweet, That Is Today’s Question

Every so often a heated debate breaks out in a writing forum I follow. “Should authors use Twitter to promote their books?” some poor poster asks. And the responses are usually instant and many.

Most of the people believe writers who use Twitter to openly sell books are slime buckets. Twitter, they say, is for making friends and connections. Authors there should share life stories or good reads or observations on life. They say we should rarely send out tweets containing links to our books. It can be done, they say if you’ve just published a new book. But the announcement should only be posted once, not repeated twenty times in one day. That’s it. That’s all you can safely do there. To do otherwise is to risk having followers cut you from their feeds.

But there is a another opinion, a brave soul who steps up and says, “Hey, wait just one dang minute.”

He says he spews out nothing but spam on Twitter. He subscribes to a program that kicks out promos multiple times every day, and from the clicks his links get, he suspects doing so sells as many as five books a week for him. He claims he has lots of followers and doesn’t care if someone drops his feeds. He’ll sell just as well to the new people who follow him.